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In Mourning > Monolith > Reviews > stefan86
In Mourning - Monolith

A step back - 52%

stefan86, January 28th, 2010

In Mourning's popularity exploded with debut "Shrouded Divine" and I was shocked to like a band with so many of the tendencies I usually despise. Heavy melodeath influence? Check. Modern progressiveness? Check. Start and stop grooves? Check. The album still had enough tasteful songwriting and feeling to mostly make a fan. And now, on to the album I'm actually writing about.

"For You To Know" starts out with a riff that's fairly typical for this band. A chuggy, rhythmic one with some melodic guitars on top. The quality of these tends to range from good to kinda vapid but this one is definitely cool. Unfortunately he goes in to a horrible vocal style in the chorus. Abrasive semi-clean vocals in the same tone that completely ruins "The Black Lodge" on the last record. The background melody is pretty cool, so the vocal idiocy is unfortunate. Rest of the song is pretty good, especially for being so heavily Opeth influenced. Bands these days who imitate them tend to suck rather hard, but here it's done without any major downfalls. Musically this song gives me good hopes for the rest of the disc.

Tracks two and three are unfortunately nothing to write home about. Despite starting out pretty good, "Debris" turns into a journey into modern progressive metal that is challenging in all the wrong ways. Some parts are good, and some parts are utter shit very comparable to the latest Opeth outputs. The songwriting that so often was fluid, tasteful and memorable on the debut is thrown out the window here. Fans of "Watershed" will likely shit their pants over this though. Track three follows the pattern, totally without reedeming parts, and the rhythm wankery mostly comes off as annoying.

Luckily "Monolith" has "The Smoke" which would fit right in on the debut. The difference from the other tracks just seems to be focus. This song craves the listeners attention, has drive and most of all good structure. The riffs and tempos fit together like a song, it's not just starts and stops between every part. And like the best track on the first album, "By Others Considered", the song goes into calm mode with the soothing emotional clean vocal style Tobias Netzell performs so well. Last four tracks are basically the same quality as track two and three, featuring the same downsides.

"Monolith" isn't bad, but I know this band could do so much better. In terms of how production, vocals and instruments are on here the bands hasn't changed much from the debut. It's mostly an annoying lack of focus in the songwriting department that holds them back. It's disappointing to see a band with obvious potential for something better dwell too much in Opeth land. Get "The Smoke" and "For You To Know" and ignore the rest.